Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) have long been employed to facilitate user data input and/or to display output data. By way of example, tables have long been employed to display data in the form of rows and columns, as well as to allow the user to input data into the rows and columns of the table. Charts, graphs, pop-up dialogs, and the like are other examples of GUIs that have been employed.
The SS7 protocol has long been employed as a signaling mechanism in telecommunication systems. Although there are many different versions of the SS7 protocol, it has been observed that the message discard mechanism in the SS7 protocol is rather inflexible. Generally speaking, when SS7 messages are received, they are first stored in an input queue. Messages are taken from the input queue and sent to the application for processing.
Each message, however, takes a finite amount of time to process and as the number of messages received overwhelms the processing capability of the system, fewer messages are removed from the input queue than are sent to the input queue. As the input queue fills up, a congestion condition is encountered.
To relieve congestion, messages are discarded based on their age. Generally speaking, the system examines the receive time-stamp associated with each SS7 message and calculates the age of the message to determine whether the message is older than a specified threshold. If the threshold is exceeded, the message is discarded.
While time-based message discard is necessary to relieve system congestion, certain modern telecommunication services, however, make it highly disadvantageous or even impractical to indiscriminately discard messages. On the other hand, if messages are not discarded from the input queue at all, congestion worsens over time and the system ultimately fails.